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I've experienced HN to be highly anti-Bitcoin for some reason -- got instantly downvoted for commenting neutrally on it [0]. However, I sort of expected more p

by avnigo 5y ago

I've experienced HN to be highly anti-Bitcoin for some reason -- got instantly downvoted for commenting neutrally on it [0]. However, I sort of expected more people on here would sympathize with the Cypherpunk Manifesto [1] and band together against pressures to minimize our privacy. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28114156 [1]: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

acdha 5y ago
HN tends to have a lot of people who are good at technical analysis and allergic to hyperbolic marketing. By now there's been a decade of Bitcoin proponents endlessly repeating claims which are either untrue or highly aspirational while it continues to very expensively not deliver results. This brings me to the second part: anyone who does care about privacy is _especially_ not going to recommend use of Bitcoin since a system which requires you to make an irrepudiable public record of your transactions is actually worse than the status quo. Similarly, people will confabulate about it allegedly being “uncensorable” when it's both easy to censor and, being public, extremely risky for anyone concerned about censorship to use.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  I'm not sure how you can call it worse than the status quo. Last week my bank informed me that I passed my ATM limit for the year and it's going to give me a small daily allowance for the rest of the year. And then lied me on the phone that it's a requirement from the central bank. This is neither a joke nor a metaphor - this literally happened to me this month (ING in Romania -they're widely considered the best bank here). Ah, they're an ATM-only bank, they have no tellers, so I can simply not take my money out, unless I make an account with another bank and have it transferred. And this just means I'm going to hit another set of limits. There is a concerted effort to control the financial movements of the population. If you fit within common patterns you don't see it. I'm probably barely at the edge - I've moved on the order of tens of thousands - and I'm hitting it pretty hard. Revolut had my account completely blocked for a couple of months earlier this year, while completely ignoring my calls. Couldn't even close it, since it was not on zero and couldn't take money out of it. And this was for moving around on the order of thousands over a few months, mostly sending money to a few friends. This is not money laundering, this is simply using the money I make very legitimately and paying taxes for.
  - distances 5y ago
    I'd like to hear more about such limits. Do they base it on total money withdrawn, or number of withdrawals? If you don't mind, what was the limit approximately? Is it only about cash withdrawals, can you use card and online payments as before?
    - radu_floricica 5y ago
      About 60k eur anually. It's ironic, but a fair share of my withdrawals were simply because the pandemic made me want to have a cash reserve on hand, in case of emergencies. Plus a used car purchase and some renovations. Very white money, taxes already paid.
      - distances 5y ago
        Interesting that there's a limit. That's also probably many times more than I have withdrawn in my whole lifetime.
      - rini17 5y ago
        Aren't cash transactions over 5000 eur illegal in whole EU? The limit certainly stems from there (even if it isn't explicitly set by central bank). I'd definitely have lawyer on retainer if I personally moved 60k/year in cash around.
  - jobigoud 5y ago
    The worse than status quo comment of the grandparent refers to privacy, in the current system your bank (and whomever they sell the data to) knows everything, in a public and transparent ledger possibly everyone knows about what you use your coins for. It's not the case of Bitcoin right now but this move is concerning in this regard.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Worse from the perspective of privacy: right now, if you use cash your transactions are not traceable and if you use electronic systems they're subject to whatever rules the institutions you use have (e.g. your bank definitely knows who you interacted with for as long as they retain that data). Bitcoin, on the other hand, makes every transaction public and permanent so anyone in the world can track you and they can retroactively link your activity at any point in the future. If you're trying to stay anonymous, every transaction you make is an opportunity to have your identity permanently revealed if you or the other party are compromised. If, say, you make a donation to a political campaign now and power changes hands a couple of years later, there's no way to retroactively scrub that record. People will say “oh, use a tumbler” — which is again putting a permanent “I'm trying to hide illegal activity” flag up in any of the situations where you really need it (not to mention the risk of being caught in someone else's activity and having to explain that you had no idea that you were using the same tumbler as a mafioso). Note that I'm definitely not saying that the status quo is great, only that I think it's worse to make promises which the system cannot deliver. If people actually believe the Bitcoin salespeople and act as if it's privacy-preserving, they're at more risk than doing nothing at all.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  The privacy comes from the system being censorship resistant, so the platform itself can not require you to KYC yourself to the state in order to use it, or be shut down or blocked by the state. The irrepudiable public record of transactions is needed to make it censorship resistant, and does indeed come with severe privacy risks, though those can be mitigated with zk-proof cryptography (e.g. https://aztec.network/ https://aztec.network/).
  - acdha 5y ago
    > The privacy comes from the system being censorship resistant, so the platform itself can not require you to KYC yourself to the state in order to use it, or be shut down or blocked by the state. That's definitely a good example of the sales pitch, but think about how it works in the real world: 1. Nobody wants random numbers, so you have to link your Bitcoin addresses to real world identities on every transaction. Anyone you deal with can deanonymize you if required or compromised, which means that if you actually have cause for concern this is not a system you can trust. 2. Almost all transactions will require conversion to real currency at an exchange. This is, of course, a great place for a government to require KYC since the exchanges and businesses in your country are subject to local laws. 3. The network requires an easily-blocked protocol to send large amounts of data on a continuous basis. This makes it easy for a government to block unapproved exchanges — and, of course, since trying to circumvent the system is effectively waving an “illegal activity here!” flag that means that any transactions you try to make over something like a VPN have a high level of risk unless they're parties which you are certain are fully outside of your government's control. How much do you really trust that guy who says he works for the resistance with your full transaction history? 4. The next point on the sales pitch is usually “use a tumbler” or “use separate wallets for everything”. These are impractical on a regular basis, guaranteeing that people will be compromised by mistakes and again have their full public transaction history linked, and there's a huge trust problem: do you really believe everyone you interact with will keep your identity history? Will you ever make a mistake and use the wrong wallet? Will you always have so much money available that you never need to transfer funds? What happens when the police search your phone and find a banned Bitcoin client, which is to say a signed confession? Are you certain the tumbler you're using isn't compromised or run by the police? What happens when the police find someone else using the same tumbler to launder money and now you're being charged as an accomplice for the mob and are trying to prove that you were just breaking the law for some lesser crime and had no knowledge of what those guys were doing? None of that is practical: real people are not going to want or reliably keep some kind of strict opsec regimen AND they're not capable of vetting that the software is actually implementing the promised privacy features. If you actually care about censorship, the first questions you'd want to think more deeply about are how people discover and use this system: can you be certain that the exchange someone told you was private isn't a sting operation? Is the person you're trying to send money to really who you think, and operating with perfect opsec? At every point, the answer is “it's safer to use real cash” because then at least your risk exposure is limited to a single transaction at a specific point in time rather than a retroactive unveiling of your lifetime history. Now, that's not great and it'll be cool if someone does come up with a truly robust anonymous system but that is not and never will be Bitcoin so it's recklessly irresponsible to run around telling people that Bitcoin is good for privacy and censorship avoidance when it can never meet those goals. It's also irresponsible to tell people that some new thing which was just developed is safe to use when it'll take decades both to prove that and develop safe community practices around the tool — many of the approaches people have hypothesized are not known to be safe in the context of an adversary with significant network visibility or statistical analysis capacity. The other thing to remember, as we've seen with cryptography, is that you need to look at the whole system. One very nice trait about cash is that it's a robust system: I don't need to analyze a complex software stack and operating network to understand the threat model. It doesn't help anyone if, say, someone comes up with a great anonymous coin system but the local government is actively promoting exchanges and apps which are compromised — and even if you really are correct in believing that your opsec will be perfect for life, that's probably not true of everyone you deal with.
Hokusai 5y ago
HN is different depending on the time of the day. It's 02:00AM here in Europe, most of it at least. So the opinions that you see are not Europe time opinions but USA time opinions. I'm going to sleep now, but I'm part of the crowd that is strongly in favor of this type of regulations. I doubt that is going to be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. HN is not a person but many different people in different places. Your message and mine will be probably received differently at another time of the day.
- ranbdj 5y ago
  There are more places in the world than Europe and USA. I'm in Vietnam and it's 8.30 am. So maybe the opinions you're seeing are from Russia, India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, or Mongolia as well as the USA?
- StanislavPetrov 5y ago
  >but I'm part of the crowd that is strongly in favor of this type of regulations. It boggles my mind that anyone would support having the government tell you, at the point of a gun, what kind of software you are allowed to run on your own computer.
  - progforlyfe 5y ago
    Sounds a lot like the "illegal numbers" debacle.
boublepop 5y ago
> minimize our privacy. That’s not a neutral stance. The idea that anything that happens on a computer should be completely free of law, trace or any kind of governmental control is not just a stance of “we want privacy” and in fact most of the pushes are just establishing the exact same level of accountability that you have always had in pre-digital financial systems. The government has always asked you to truthfully under penalty of law report your income and financial activities. The fact that it was difficult for them to tell if you lied is not a question about rights that’s a question of accountability. The government has always had financial regulations for banks, financial institutions and securities, the fact that it has been easy for people to ignore those rules is not a question of rights, it’s a question about accountability. You claim neutrality but the very framing of the discussion you take is an extremist point of view. It’s essentially like saying “The civil war was about states rights and I’m neutral about if they where right”
southerntofu 5y ago
That's the case for me indeed. I strongly agree with the arguments against Bitcoin, but i can only sympathize with a p2p protocol being hunted down by governments.
a_square_peg 5y ago
One thing that I find hard to sympathize in terms of Cyperpunk Manifesto is that a lot of it seems to do with perceived oppression of government and is written and supported by those who live in a countries with representative democracy.
NicoJuicy 5y ago
The governement should know who you are and the bank you are associated too, if that's required to do business with them. Eg. VISA should be able to return my money to my bank account if someone has a chance to abuse the system and target me. I don't want companies to share my information to third parties, this includes the banks about my purchases. And eg. Facebook shouldn't be able to target me because a site added their 'like button'. Privacy doesn't mean lawless land of crypto companies hiding in unknown countries. I actually expect governement regulation to protect it's tax-paying citizens. That's why we vote for them. Edit: As a counter argument, there are also a lot of downvotes without reasonable arguments when you argument against crypto ;) Edit 2: the informed article you shared is actually pretty biased from my POV, definitely not neutral + The additional sanity check when checking the author didn't check out either.
- ilaksh 5y ago
  Visa is obsolete. That's the first point most people miss in these cryptocurrency discussions. Credit cards require you to disclose your secret credentials that allow withdrawals from your account. Cryptocurrency payments do not because they apply math and computer science to the problem. The banking systems are also mostly obsolete because they are usually on an outdated paradigm without a blockchain. Blockchains are the starting point for cheat-proof ledgers. Most existing financial ledgers are susceptible to manipulation. Some by design.
  - kimixa 5y ago
    They don't have to though - asymmetric authentication has been a thing for decades. The issue with current card transactions is the size of the identifier string - 16 digits isn't enough to do anything particularly useful with that can't be near-instantly brute forced. Chip and pin somewhat improves that, all we need is to completely deprecate the idea of a "16 digit card number" and it opens up a world of possibilities. No "cryptocurrency" or "blockchain" needed. And for many a "reverse-able" ledger is a bonus not a disadvantage - the "Average Guy On The Street" falls for personal scams or need to do chargebacks waaayyyyy more than fall foul of bank-level fraud.
elliekelly 5y ago
I am absolutely of the opinion that we deserve more privacy when it comes to our transactions. We need and deserve a privacy-oriented payment system but we also need a financial system that is reliable, trustworthy, and most of all, fair. That’s not Bitcoin. I don’t know whether predatory investments and outright scams are simply inevitable with the anonymity cryptocurrency provides. I’d like to think there are some perfectly valid and net-beneficial use cases. But it seems pretty clear that crypto, in its current iteration, is exploitative at best and the only real use case beyond pyramid schemes is facilitating criminal activity. It was a cool experiment. We tried it. It doesn’t work. A lot of people have learned (and some are still yet to learn) the hard way why our financial systems are so heavily regulated. But if we’re looking for increased privacy (and we should be!) we need to start looking beyond Bitcoin.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  What makes you say it doesn’t work? And, you can’t have privacy and still prevent illicit transactions. Any way that leaks intent is by definition not private. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies work fine, and achieve their goals.
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    > And, you can’t have privacy and still prevent illicit transactions. Any way that leaks intent is by definition not private. Sure you can. Cash does. It’s why we don’t have large denominated bills.
- meowkit 5y ago
  This is a really cynical and oversimplified take in my opinion. Our centralized financial systems have a lot of regulation for outsiders, but the rules selectively apply to those with power and capital. If the Panama Papers/FinCEN leaks have shown me anything its that our financial systems are not sufficiently policing themselves. Having all transactions on open source ledgers is a good start. With zero knowledge proofs I’m fairly confident we can design auxiliary systems that can obfuscate senders/receivers/amounts while also allowing for fraud detection by the community as a whole - with slashing style incentives we won’t have to worry as much about regulatory capture and similar things.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
It's because it's an established technology that only attracts speculation and scams because it detaches the creation of capital from the utilization of labor and production and replaces it with hardware. It's a fundamentally "wrong" currency in that you cannot request labor in exchange for debt. Instead you can request labor in exchange for waiting for a machine to generate the value of labor. People say, well that's great, because no one wants debt. Except you do. You do want debt to exist in the world, because you want people to have an incentive to make things and do things versus not making things and doing things. It makes no sense. It's mass appeal is driven by the fact that one person exchanges fiat to another person in exchange for the currency itself in larger price to fiat over time. I think it's actually somewhat sustainable nonsense too, because people really think you can dollar cost average it. And if you have it and need to actually buy something with it, you are only incentivized to ask for more fiat in exchange for it, because people will buy it for strange reasons like simple moving average. It's not a good currency, because it's not price stable, and it's not a good investment, since there's no underlying or relational value associated with it. So what is it?
- glitchc 5y ago
  It seems like this comment appears in every Bitcoin post. I get a deja vu feeling when I read it. To the OP, is this copy-pasted to every new BTC post? Truly curious.
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    No, it's not copypasta. If you consistently hear this from other people, I would reflect on it, then.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  You have bought into the debt argument, and loose money. I like hard money. Infinity / 21M
  - andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    Then you don't understand how currencies work today. It's like saying we should go back to the gold standard. It makes no sense. Labor capacity increases as population grows. Gold does not grow. Should we all exchange slivers of gold? No. That would be nonsensical.

by avnigo 5y ago

acdha 5y ago

HN tends to have a lot of people who are good at technical analysis and allergic to hyperbolic marketing. By now there's been a decade of Bitcoin proponents endlessly repeating claims which are either untrue or highly aspirational while it continues to very expensively not deliver results. This brings me to the second part: anyone who does care about privacy is _especially_ not going to recommend use of Bitcoin since a system which requires you to make an irrepudiable public record of your transactions is actually worse than the status quo. Similarly, people will confabulate about it allegedly being “uncensorable” when it's both easy to censor and, being public, extremely risky for anyone concerned about censorship to use.

radu_floricica 5y ago
I'm not sure how you can call it worse than the status quo. Last week my bank informed me that I passed my ATM limit for the year and it's going to give me a small daily allowance for the rest of the year. And then lied me on the phone that it's a requirement from the central bank. This is neither a joke nor a metaphor - this literally happened to me this month (ING in Romania -they're widely considered the best bank here). Ah, they're an ATM-only bank, they have no tellers, so I can simply not take my money out, unless I make an account with another bank and have it transferred. And this just means I'm going to hit another set of limits. There is a concerted effort to control the financial movements of the population. If you fit within common patterns you don't see it. I'm probably barely at the edge - I've moved on the order of tens of thousands - and I'm hitting it pretty hard. Revolut had my account completely blocked for a couple of months earlier this year, while completely ignoring my calls. Couldn't even close it, since it was not on zero and couldn't take money out of it. And this was for moving around on the order of thousands over a few months, mostly sending money to a few friends. This is not money laundering, this is simply using the money I make very legitimately and paying taxes for.
- distances 5y ago
  I'd like to hear more about such limits. Do they base it on total money withdrawn, or number of withdrawals? If you don't mind, what was the limit approximately? Is it only about cash withdrawals, can you use card and online payments as before?
  - radu_floricica 5y ago
    About 60k eur anually. It's ironic, but a fair share of my withdrawals were simply because the pandemic made me want to have a cash reserve on hand, in case of emergencies. Plus a used car purchase and some renovations. Very white money, taxes already paid.
    - distances 5y ago
      Interesting that there's a limit. That's also probably many times more than I have withdrawn in my whole lifetime.
    - rini17 5y ago
      Aren't cash transactions over 5000 eur illegal in whole EU? The limit certainly stems from there (even if it isn't explicitly set by central bank). I'd definitely have lawyer on retainer if I personally moved 60k/year in cash around.
- jobigoud 5y ago
  The worse than status quo comment of the grandparent refers to privacy, in the current system your bank (and whomever they sell the data to) knows everything, in a public and transparent ledger possibly everyone knows about what you use your coins for. It's not the case of Bitcoin right now but this move is concerning in this regard.
- acdha 5y ago
  Worse from the perspective of privacy: right now, if you use cash your transactions are not traceable and if you use electronic systems they're subject to whatever rules the institutions you use have (e.g. your bank definitely knows who you interacted with for as long as they retain that data). Bitcoin, on the other hand, makes every transaction public and permanent so anyone in the world can track you and they can retroactively link your activity at any point in the future. If you're trying to stay anonymous, every transaction you make is an opportunity to have your identity permanently revealed if you or the other party are compromised. If, say, you make a donation to a political campaign now and power changes hands a couple of years later, there's no way to retroactively scrub that record. People will say “oh, use a tumbler” — which is again putting a permanent “I'm trying to hide illegal activity” flag up in any of the situations where you really need it (not to mention the risk of being caught in someone else's activity and having to explain that you had no idea that you were using the same tumbler as a mafioso). Note that I'm definitely not saying that the status quo is great, only that I think it's worse to make promises which the system cannot deliver. If people actually believe the Bitcoin salespeople and act as if it's privacy-preserving, they're at more risk than doing nothing at all.
CryptoPunk 5y ago
The privacy comes from the system being censorship resistant, so the platform itself can not require you to KYC yourself to the state in order to use it, or be shut down or blocked by the state. The irrepudiable public record of transactions is needed to make it censorship resistant, and does indeed come with severe privacy risks, though those can be mitigated with zk-proof cryptography (e.g. https://aztec.network/ https://aztec.network/).
- acdha 5y ago
  > The privacy comes from the system being censorship resistant, so the platform itself can not require you to KYC yourself to the state in order to use it, or be shut down or blocked by the state. That's definitely a good example of the sales pitch, but think about how it works in the real world: 1. Nobody wants random numbers, so you have to link your Bitcoin addresses to real world identities on every transaction. Anyone you deal with can deanonymize you if required or compromised, which means that if you actually have cause for concern this is not a system you can trust. 2. Almost all transactions will require conversion to real currency at an exchange. This is, of course, a great place for a government to require KYC since the exchanges and businesses in your country are subject to local laws. 3. The network requires an easily-blocked protocol to send large amounts of data on a continuous basis. This makes it easy for a government to block unapproved exchanges — and, of course, since trying to circumvent the system is effectively waving an “illegal activity here!” flag that means that any transactions you try to make over something like a VPN have a high level of risk unless they're parties which you are certain are fully outside of your government's control. How much do you really trust that guy who says he works for the resistance with your full transaction history? 4. The next point on the sales pitch is usually “use a tumbler” or “use separate wallets for everything”. These are impractical on a regular basis, guaranteeing that people will be compromised by mistakes and again have their full public transaction history linked, and there's a huge trust problem: do you really believe everyone you interact with will keep your identity history? Will you ever make a mistake and use the wrong wallet? Will you always have so much money available that you never need to transfer funds? What happens when the police search your phone and find a banned Bitcoin client, which is to say a signed confession? Are you certain the tumbler you're using isn't compromised or run by the police? What happens when the police find someone else using the same tumbler to launder money and now you're being charged as an accomplice for the mob and are trying to prove that you were just breaking the law for some lesser crime and had no knowledge of what those guys were doing? None of that is practical: real people are not going to want or reliably keep some kind of strict opsec regimen AND they're not capable of vetting that the software is actually implementing the promised privacy features. If you actually care about censorship, the first questions you'd want to think more deeply about are how people discover and use this system: can you be certain that the exchange someone told you was private isn't a sting operation? Is the person you're trying to send money to really who you think, and operating with perfect opsec? At every point, the answer is “it's safer to use real cash” because then at least your risk exposure is limited to a single transaction at a specific point in time rather than a retroactive unveiling of your lifetime history. Now, that's not great and it'll be cool if someone does come up with a truly robust anonymous system but that is not and never will be Bitcoin so it's recklessly irresponsible to run around telling people that Bitcoin is good for privacy and censorship avoidance when it can never meet those goals. It's also irresponsible to tell people that some new thing which was just developed is safe to use when it'll take decades both to prove that and develop safe community practices around the tool — many of the approaches people have hypothesized are not known to be safe in the context of an adversary with significant network visibility or statistical analysis capacity. The other thing to remember, as we've seen with cryptography, is that you need to look at the whole system. One very nice trait about cash is that it's a robust system: I don't need to analyze a complex software stack and operating network to understand the threat model. It doesn't help anyone if, say, someone comes up with a great anonymous coin system but the local government is actively promoting exchanges and apps which are compromised — and even if you really are correct in believing that your opsec will be perfect for life, that's probably not true of everyone you deal with.

Hokusai 5y ago

HN is different depending on the time of the day. It's 02:00AM here in Europe, most of it at least. So the opinions that you see are not Europe time opinions but USA time opinions. I'm going to sleep now, but I'm part of the crowd that is strongly in favor of this type of regulations. I doubt that is going to be perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. HN is not a person but many different people in different places. Your message and mine will be probably received differently at another time of the day.

ranbdj 5y ago
There are more places in the world than Europe and USA. I'm in Vietnam and it's 8.30 am. So maybe the opinions you're seeing are from Russia, India, China, Thailand, Indonesia, or Mongolia as well as the USA?
StanislavPetrov 5y ago
>but I'm part of the crowd that is strongly in favor of this type of regulations. It boggles my mind that anyone would support having the government tell you, at the point of a gun, what kind of software you are allowed to run on your own computer.
- progforlyfe 5y ago
  Sounds a lot like the "illegal numbers" debacle.

boublepop 5y ago

> minimize our privacy. That’s not a neutral stance. The idea that anything that happens on a computer should be completely free of law, trace or any kind of governmental control is not just a stance of “we want privacy” and in fact most of the pushes are just establishing the exact same level of accountability that you have always had in pre-digital financial systems. The government has always asked you to truthfully under penalty of law report your income and financial activities. The fact that it was difficult for them to tell if you lied is not a question about rights that’s a question of accountability. The government has always had financial regulations for banks, financial institutions and securities, the fact that it has been easy for people to ignore those rules is not a question of rights, it’s a question about accountability. You claim neutrality but the very framing of the discussion you take is an extremist point of view. It’s essentially like saying “The civil war was about states rights and I’m neutral about if they where right”

southerntofu 5y ago

That's the case for me indeed. I strongly agree with the arguments against Bitcoin, but i can only sympathize with a p2p protocol being hunted down by governments.

a_square_peg 5y ago

One thing that I find hard to sympathize in terms of Cyperpunk Manifesto is that a lot of it seems to do with perceived oppression of government and is written and supported by those who live in a countries with representative democracy.

NicoJuicy 5y ago

The governement should know who you are and the bank you are associated too, if that's required to do business with them. Eg. VISA should be able to return my money to my bank account if someone has a chance to abuse the system and target me. I don't want companies to share my information to third parties, this includes the banks about my purchases. And eg. Facebook shouldn't be able to target me because a site added their 'like button'. Privacy doesn't mean lawless land of crypto companies hiding in unknown countries. I actually expect governement regulation to protect it's tax-paying citizens. That's why we vote for them. Edit: As a counter argument, there are also a lot of downvotes without reasonable arguments when you argument against crypto ;) Edit 2: the informed article you shared is actually pretty biased from my POV, definitely not neutral + The additional sanity check when checking the author didn't check out either.

ilaksh 5y ago
Visa is obsolete. That's the first point most people miss in these cryptocurrency discussions. Credit cards require you to disclose your secret credentials that allow withdrawals from your account. Cryptocurrency payments do not because they apply math and computer science to the problem. The banking systems are also mostly obsolete because they are usually on an outdated paradigm without a blockchain. Blockchains are the starting point for cheat-proof ledgers. Most existing financial ledgers are susceptible to manipulation. Some by design.
- kimixa 5y ago
  They don't have to though - asymmetric authentication has been a thing for decades. The issue with current card transactions is the size of the identifier string - 16 digits isn't enough to do anything particularly useful with that can't be near-instantly brute forced. Chip and pin somewhat improves that, all we need is to completely deprecate the idea of a "16 digit card number" and it opens up a world of possibilities. No "cryptocurrency" or "blockchain" needed. And for many a "reverse-able" ledger is a bonus not a disadvantage - the "Average Guy On The Street" falls for personal scams or need to do chargebacks waaayyyyy more than fall foul of bank-level fraud.

elliekelly 5y ago

I am absolutely of the opinion that we deserve more privacy when it comes to our transactions. We need and deserve a privacy-oriented payment system but we also need a financial system that is reliable, trustworthy, and most of all, fair. That’s not Bitcoin. I don’t know whether predatory investments and outright scams are simply inevitable with the anonymity cryptocurrency provides. I’d like to think there are some perfectly valid and net-beneficial use cases. But it seems pretty clear that crypto, in its current iteration, is exploitative at best and the only real use case beyond pyramid schemes is facilitating criminal activity. It was a cool experiment. We tried it. It doesn’t work. A lot of people have learned (and some are still yet to learn) the hard way why our financial systems are so heavily regulated. But if we’re looking for increased privacy (and we should be!) we need to start looking beyond Bitcoin.

randomhodler84 5y ago
What makes you say it doesn’t work? And, you can’t have privacy and still prevent illicit transactions. Any way that leaks intent is by definition not private. Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies work fine, and achieve their goals.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > And, you can’t have privacy and still prevent illicit transactions. Any way that leaks intent is by definition not private. Sure you can. Cash does. It’s why we don’t have large denominated bills.
meowkit 5y ago
This is a really cynical and oversimplified take in my opinion. Our centralized financial systems have a lot of regulation for outsiders, but the rules selectively apply to those with power and capital. If the Panama Papers/FinCEN leaks have shown me anything its that our financial systems are not sufficiently policing themselves. Having all transactions on open source ledgers is a good start. With zero knowledge proofs I’m fairly confident we can design auxiliary systems that can obfuscate senders/receivers/amounts while also allowing for fraud detection by the community as a whole - with slashing style incentives we won’t have to worry as much about regulatory capture and similar things.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

It's because it's an established technology that only attracts speculation and scams because it detaches the creation of capital from the utilization of labor and production and replaces it with hardware. It's a fundamentally "wrong" currency in that you cannot request labor in exchange for debt. Instead you can request labor in exchange for waiting for a machine to generate the value of labor. People say, well that's great, because no one wants debt. Except you do. You do want debt to exist in the world, because you want people to have an incentive to make things and do things versus not making things and doing things. It makes no sense. It's mass appeal is driven by the fact that one person exchanges fiat to another person in exchange for the currency itself in larger price to fiat over time. I think it's actually somewhat sustainable nonsense too, because people really think you can dollar cost average it. And if you have it and need to actually buy something with it, you are only incentivized to ask for more fiat in exchange for it, because people will buy it for strange reasons like simple moving average. It's not a good currency, because it's not price stable, and it's not a good investment, since there's no underlying or relational value associated with it. So what is it?

glitchc 5y ago
It seems like this comment appears in every Bitcoin post. I get a deja vu feeling when I read it. To the OP, is this copy-pasted to every new BTC post? Truly curious.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  No, it's not copypasta. If you consistently hear this from other people, I would reflect on it, then.
randomhodler84 5y ago
You have bought into the debt argument, and loose money. I like hard money. Infinity / 21M
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Then you don't understand how currencies work today. It's like saying we should go back to the gold standard. It makes no sense. Labor capacity increases as population grows. Gold does not grow. Should we all exchange slivers of gold? No. That would be nonsensical.